Fanfare US 2. review

Four stars: Unique, original music by a Danish composer who deserves to be better known

BORUP-JØRGENSEN Intrada, op. 149. Trio, op. 1341. Ricostruzioni, op. 714. Malincolia, op. 682,3. Distichon, op. 671. Rapsodi, op. 114:3. “mikroorganismer”, op. 20b2,3  Esbjerg Ens; 1Kristoffer Hyldig (pn); 2Joel Bardolet, 3Bernat Paul Sabater (vn); 4Niklas Kalisoy Mouritsen (hn)  OUR 8.226925 (65:58)

Axel Borup-Jørgensen (1924-2012) was a Danish composer who died just a month or so before his 88th birthday. His music has become a major cause for OUR Recordings, founded in 2006 by recorder virtuoso (shouldn’t that be “virtuosa”?) Michala Petri and her then-husband, guitarist Lars Hannibal. The current disc is the eighth and latest in an extensive series of Borup-Jørgensen releases from OUR, following albums of his orchestral, organ, piano and guitar pieces.
Though Borup-Jørgensen himself was never interviewed for Fanfare, a number of people who knew and worked with him have been. Many of the interviews were with musicians who’ve played Borup-Jørgensen’s music on previous OUR recordings: pianist Erik Kaltoft; organist Jens E. Christensen; guitarist Frederik Munk Larsen; guitarist and audio producer Leif Hesselberg; and Michala Petri herself.
The picture of Borup-Jørgensen that comes through in these interviews is a Citizen Kane-style one of a man whose life was a series of contradictions. He was born in Denmark but spent virtually all his childhood in Sweden, where his family moved when he was 2 ½. Borup-Jørgensen didn’t resettle in Denmark until he was a young adult, when he was accepted as a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen in 1946. That meant he escaped having to deal with the Nazi occupation of his homeland, since Sweden was neutral during World War II. He also seems to have been independently wealthy (his family owned an island), so he didn’t have to worry about making a living either from his music or doing something else, the way Charles Ives ran an insurance business and composed in his spare time.
Borup-Jørgensen’s acquaintances describe him as a recluse, but he seemed to have some level of social skills. “I was a friend of his for more than 40 years,” said Erik Kaltoft (Fanfare 40:2, November-December 2016). “You say the music is private, but he was very private. A kind, smiling man, but when it came to his music and his points of view, he could be very stubborn! He was an artist, and he had his own ideas, and he worked in quite a small field of expression—but within that he has a lot of lyrical qualities and his music is very poetic. Sometimes it bursts out and has an outgoing drama in it.”
“Erik knew him more intimately than I did; he knew him for a bigger span of years,” said Frederik Munk Larsen (Fanfare 42:4, March-April 2019). “I knew him roughly for 10 years, and during that time I collaborated with him maybe five or six times, on different works, both chamber music and solo works. … [H]e could appear shy, but he also had a strong will. And when you played a concert in the Copenhagen area, he was always there, you would always see him, always dressed in the same white clothing. And in his music, too, he seems to be somewhat stubborn. He doesn’t stop using his material; instead, all the time he finds new ways of dealing with it. He’s adventurous in the way that he uses those building blocks, but he tried to put them together in different ways; and so in that sense I feel that his music is personal.”
Jens Christensen (Fanfare 40:4, March-April 2017) agreed that Borup-Jørgensen was “very discreet and modest. And he was very afraid to hurt us, the artists. He was very careful. When he came on his bicycle and I was trying to play what he had written to me and talk about it, if I didn’t play it well, then he thought that he had written it wrong. So he went home to change it. It was very important to be careful to play as well as possible for him, because he would always think that he was the problem, not the other people.” Borup-Jørgensen was briefly married to a fellow musician, and they remained on good enough terms that he composed a duet piece for harpsichord (her instrument) and organ after their breakup. Their daughter Elisabet is now in charge of Borup-Jørgensen’s estate and his musical legacy.
So what does Axel Borup-Jørgensen’s music sound like? First, most of his pieces are quite brief. The work generally considered to be his masterpiece, the orchestral tone poem Marin, is just 23 minutes long even though he spent seven years (1963-1970) composing it. There are pieces in his oeuvre that last minutes or even seconds, including a multi-movement work called Miniaturesuite for guitar that contains a Praeludium, Fantasia, Interludium, Sarabande, and Praeludium, but the whole piece is over in less than three minutes. The final work on this CD, “mikroorganismer” for string quartet (1956), is a series of 13 so-called “short sketches” that times out at 6:02 and was originally inspired by a public performance of another work that did not go well.
In an extended quote from Joshua Cheek (who seems to be OUR’s go-to writer for liner notes on all their Borup-Jørgensen releases), Borup-Jørgensen calls “mikroorganismer” (the quotation marks are part of the title) “a reaction to the performance of another work, Improvisationer, op. 17. Or perhaps more accurately, a reaction to the reactions to the performance. When I wrote Improvisationer, I had a feeling that I had now found my way. But the scattered laughter during the performance and the criticism the next day typically visited that the piece offered a completely different feeling; the critic wrote, among other things, that ‘there was no foothold on the skeleton of effects that the composer came up with.’ And I, who had felt that it was written with my heart’s blood—that blood test did not turn out so well.”
Other aspects of Borup-Jørgensen’s works that come through on this CD include his love of percussion—the disc opens with Intrada, a piece for solo percussion, and the first five minutes of Marin are so percussion-heavy it sounds like a concerto for percussion and orchestra—and, when he writes for melodic instruments, his tendency to use the upper ranges of them almost exclusively. Borup-Jørgensen tended to compose in short bursts of sound; I found myself thinking of Pointillism (while drawing back from using that term, remembering how much Debussy resented his music being compared to Impressionist art, which he disliked), and I felt a bit easier when Joshua Cheek’s notes on the string quartet Malincolia (1972-1974) referred to a “short pointillistic fragment” just after the piece’s big opening chord.
Also, unlike other long-lived composers, particularly Stravinsky, Borup-Jørgensen didn’t make big, wrenching changes in his style over the course of his career. The earliest piece on this CD, “microorganismer,” dates from 1956 and the latest, Rapsodi for solo viola, was composed between 1994 and 1996, but though they don’t all sound exactly the same there is a strong stylistic thread running through the disc. Borup-Jørgensen was aware of the various movements sweeping through European music—he briefly went to Darmstadt, Germany, when it was the hotbed of 12-tone serialism—but he largely ignored them. The repetition of themes characteristic of much of his music has led to him being called a Minimalist, but though his big piano piece Thallata!Thallata! (that spelling of the title—a single word repeated, with an exclamation point but no space between the words—is correct) has just one main theme, it doesn’t sound at all like garden-variety Minimalism.
Overall, Borup-Jørgensen’s music is compelling even though emotionally it’s pretty bleak. Joshua Cheek’s liner notes refer to the “sustained, elegiac mood” of the Trio for clarinet, piano and cello, op. 134 (1988-1990) and the “elegiac mode of lament” in Distichon, op. 67, for violin and piano (1974), named for a form of poetry usually used in elegies. The miniature (nine-minute) string quartet (1972-74) is even called Malincolia. This is not cheery feel-good music, nor does it pretend to be. It’s also interesting that some of the instrumental lineups were used by “name” composers in the 18th and 19th centuries. The wind quintet Ricostruzioni uses the same instruments (piano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn) as Mozart’s Wind Quintet, K. 452 (a piece Mozart told his father was the best thing he’d written to that point) and the clarinet trio uses the same lineup as Beethoven’s “Gassenhauer” Trio and Brahms’s op. 114.
Borup-Jørgensen’s music is superbly played here by the Esbjerg Ensemble, composed (as Cheek tells us) “of 10 passionate and expressive musicians from around the world, each carefully selected for their unique qualities.” They brought in four guest musicians as well: Danish pianist Kristoffer Hyldig, who last appeared on OUR’s great record of Carl Nielsen’s own two-piano arrangement of his Symphony No. 3; Spanish violinists Joel Bardolet and Bernat Prat Sabater, who play on the two string quartets; and Faroe Island hornist Niklas Kallsoy Mountsen. OUR’s producer, Mette Due, gives the recording excellent and fully transparent sound quality. Recommended, especially to listeners who want to hear something unique and individual. Mark Gabrish Conlan, October 2024

Four stars: Unique, original music by a Danish composer who deserves to be better known